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Author Topic: How to get AmigaBASIC running on Kickstart 3.1?  (Read 10885 times)

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Offline mark_k

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Re: How to get AmigaBASIC running on Kickstart 3.1?
« on: January 19, 2013, 04:24:36 PM »
Quote from: danwood;722940
So anyone got the original ABasic working? :)
If you're talking about Metacomco's ABasiC, then yes. :)
 

Offline mark_k

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Re: How to get AmigaBASIC running on Kickstart 3.1?
« Reply #1 on: January 20, 2013, 06:41:03 PM »
Quote from: Piru;694678
IIRC amigabasic uses the upper 8-bit of addresses to store some information. That means it won't work with memory above 24-bit (0xffffff or 16MB). Assuming you apply the patch mentioned earlier and disable all memory above the limit, it could work.

If you have a 32-bit CPU there could be problems doing that. Any accesses to addresses above 16MB (as AmigaBASIC may use) could result in a bus error, or at least not return the correct values.

One workaround could be to use SetCPU with its FASTROM option, along with specifying BITS 24. That should (hopefully) cause the MMU to remap all accesses above 16MB to the lower 16MB region.

At least when I tried than in WinUAE with a 68030+MMU config and no RAM above 16MB, all the BASIC demos on the Extras disk seemed to work fine. But having said that, they all seemed to work fine without using SetCPU! But with some Zorro III RAM, on clicking one of the BasicDemos icons, AmigaBASIC just reports file not found. After running NoFastMem, opening the BasicDemos icons did work properly.

Maybe AmigaBASIC sanitises its addresses, i.e. always clears the upper 8 bits before the memory access. So the crucial thing is to have AmigaBASIC only work with memory in the lower 16MB. You could use NoFastMem for that, but if you have some Zorro II fast RAM (or $C00000 slow RAM) that's a waste of chip RAM. If there's a utility like NoFastMem, but which forces all allocations to use the MEMF_24BITDMA flag, you could run that instead before loading AmigaBASIC.
 

Offline mark_k

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Re: How to get AmigaBASIC running on Kickstart 3.1?
« Reply #2 on: January 22, 2013, 02:45:06 PM »
Quote from: AmigaBruno;723501
I've never even owned, let alone used, ABasiC (SP?), by Metacomco. I know that Metacomco was chosen because of their previous work on the 68008 based Sinclair QL computer, though. Is this version of BASIC similar to or the same as SuperBASIC on the Sinclair QL computer?

I've never even owned, let alone used, SuperBASIC so can't say how similar or not it is. :)

But if you want to try it, download the ABasiC patch from Aminet. The readme file lists several URLs where you can download ABasiC from. Also get the user manual and errata from here. There are some ABasiC programs on Aminet.
 

Offline mark_k

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Re: How to get AmigaBASIC running on Kickstart 3.1?
« Reply #3 on: January 24, 2013, 01:53:01 PM »
Quote from: AmigaBruno;723669
I've just tried a few links where I was supposed to be able to get a copy of the manual, but they're all out of date.

I've never owned or used Sinclair QL SuperBASIC, but I've read various listings in that BASIC dialect. It seems to be like an extended version of Sinclair Spectrum BASIC, including some features such as procedures, which are like BBC BASIC. It has been called similar to COMAL. Here's a link to an introduction to this BASIC dialect https://sites.google.com/site/iwant2learn2/home/superbasic .

Unfortunately, I still haven't found any ABasiC listings or a list of ABasiC commands, but I have read that although it didn't have much support for the Amiga's Intuition features, including windows, it was good at doing Amiga graphics.


The links for the ABasiC manual and errata shown here are still valid. I linked to an archive of ABasiC programs on Aminet already. :) ABasiC programs are plain text files; you can load them into any text editor.

It looks like QL SuperBASIC is more sophisticated than ABasiC. You can't define your own procedures in ABasiC, for example.